Our much-maligned lawmakers

It says a great deal about the extraordinary forbearance, the calm self-possession and the dignified restraint of members of the National Assembly that they have for so long put up with the most provocative falsehoods circulated and re-circulated about their compensation package and refused to be drawn into any discussion or debate on the issue.

Their remit, remember, is to make good laws for the governance of Nigeria. A discussion of their compensation package would therefore have been not merely a distraction; it would also have been subversive of that sacred mandate.

A principal aide to one distinguished lawmaker told me that nothing would have been easier for the National Assembly to invoke its sweeping powers to teach these career calumniators a lesson they will never forget, and that the Assembly in fact came frequently under pressure to do just that.

The aide was corroborated by one of the 25 personal assistants of another lawmaker whose ambition is to be elevated from the ranks of the merely honourable to the league of the actually distinguished. That aide was in turn corroborated by the deputy chief driver for another lawmaker’s fleet of exotic motorcars.

But the collective wisdom of entire Assembly usually prevailed.

Don’t dignify these frustrated malcontents whom we shall unfortunately always have among us: don’t dignify them by answering or chastising them.

Better to let them stew in their envy and drown in their cacophony, those so-called civil-society activists on the prowl for the next commissioned hit job, brown-envelope journalists sounding off as if they were crackerjack investigative reporters, frazzled charge-and-bail lawyers in their threadbare gowns and mouldy wigs, shoes misshapen from pounding court houses in search of clients, and self-styled anti-corruption crusaders so used to hearing their own jaded voices that they can no longer hear anything else.

Day after day, in season and out of season, they carped endlessly about what they gave a gullible public to believe was the compensation package of our lawmakers – a package it would be courteous to call unconscionable and downright obscene even if was only 50 percent accurate.

Each of these groups put out its own jaundiced and discrepant figures, but a public only too willing to believe the worst about persons of great consequence was not in the least troubled by the inconsistencies.

In fact, the more improbable the figures, the more enthusiastically they were embraced by the public.

Going by one of the more brazen publications, merely honourable lawmakers took home some N40 million every month. Forty million Naira each month in the year, it is necessary to repeat, lest those of our countrymen whom time and tide and circumstance left behind think the figure represents the official compensation for an entire year.

Distinguished members carted home some N2 million more each month, according to the publications under reference, satisfied that though insubstantial in monetary terms, it represented at least a tacit acknowledgement of the difference between being merely honourable and being truly distinguished.

And these figures pertained only to above-the-table-payments, the traducers said, leaving it to the public to fill in, as its warped imagination dictated, what must have passed under the table.

They had calculated that this strategy would goad the lawmakers out of their silence and engender a debate that was sure to trap them irretrievably in syndicated sleaze. If they say their earnings are not a monumental scam and a shameless one at that, let them spell out their earnings clearly and unambiguously.

Actuated as always by the finest traditions of noblesse oblige, the lawmakers refused. Their slanderers who probably think that noblesse oblige is a delicacy specially confected to tickle the palates of the degenerate lawmakers argued that the lawmakers’ stony silence stemmed from nothing higher than the animal instinct for self-preservation. They kept piling on, hoping that the wall of silence would develop a crack if the battering was kept going long enough.

And so, the inventory of acts and non-acts for which they said the lawmakers were lavishly compensated just kept growing and growing.

At one point, it included the following: sitting, standing and maintaining every position in between; for meeting and not meeting; for clearing their throats to talk, talking, and not talking; for not clearing their throats; for belching and refraining from belching; for staying in one place and going everywhere; for picking their teeth; for the upkeep of their harems and their cars and their pets; for their clothing, right up to their intimate apparel, and generally keeping up with the latest fashion trends; for hair care, manicure, pedicure, face and body massage; for sleeping on the job or staying awake.

They even put it about that our lawmakers had parlayed what in their ignorance they called “the sedate and cushy job” of making laws into a punitive hardship that must be bounteously rewarded in cash.

So unremitting was the malevolence of the calumniators that, instead of applauding our public-spirited lawmakers for submitting to debate a proposal to cut their allowances by a hefty 30 percent when they could have preempted discussion or raised their emoluments to keep pace with soaring inflation and the misfortunes of the Naira, they quipped: 30 percent of what?

Now we know the truth. And it has come, not from the jaundiced calumniators aforementioned, but from the least expected source–the Senate itself.

According to Senator Sani (APC, Kaduna Central), the consolidated salary and allowances for each member of the Senate stands at only N700, 000 a month.

In addition, each senator receives N13.5 million, being only unspecified “running costs” that must be accounted for nevertheless, and is thus strictly not a part of the so-called compensation package.

To top it off, each senator is awarded a grant of N200 million a year as grant for projects to be sited in his or her constituency. Contrary to what the calumniators have been claiming, the grant does not come as a cash handout. The project is executed not by the lawmaker but through a private arrangement between him or her and a certified government agency.

The arrangement leaves plenty of room for chiseling, Sani has acknowledged. But it is nothing like the organised swindle the calumniators have been calling it.

Prorated, the entire package may well gross out at some N42 million per month for each senator. But that is emphatically not a monthly salary as the public had been led to believe.

Even if you added the costs of all those luxury cars that the lawmakers are always acquiring with public funds and the unspent funds they share out at the end of each year as if they came out of a trading surplus, any objective commentator would give our lawmakers high praise for judicious fiscal husbandry.

As I see it, they deserve an immediate and unconditional apology from their calumniators.

But that is not the way the lawmakers see it. Sani has said far too much for their comfort and pulled one stunt too many, they have been saying. I hear they have ordered the senator representing Kogi West to bring out the knives – as if he needed any prompting.